Ex-communist Europe

Organised crime in the Balkans

IT WAS the end of the line for the lobster-pot cocaine plot on June 2nd. Five men were sentenced at Kingston Crown Court to a total of 104 years for attempting to smuggle 255 kg (562 pounds) of high-purity cocaine into Britain. The drugs (pictured) had been dumped into the sea in May 2010 from the MSC Oriane, a container ship which was en route from Brazil to Antwerp.

Britain's security agencies are cock-a-hoop after stopping £53m ($87m) worth of cocaine from reaching the country. But the size and sophistication of the foiled plot suggests that the authorities should be careful about celebrating their achievement.

Latvian politics

LATVIA is in danger of producing more news than it can comfortably consume. This week's print edition carries a brief analysis of the latest shenanigans, in which President Valdis Zatlers has called a referendum on the dissolution of the Saeima (Parliament) in protest at its vote to block an investigation by KNAB, the country's anti-corruption agency, of the three most powerful oligarchs (tycoons). I wrote a rather longer piece here in European Voice on the same topic.*

Ratko Mladic

IN THE early hours of Friday morning a group of men sat in hotel bar laughing and toasting each other. One, wearing a causal outfit and a black bomber jacket, was chomping a cigar. Beefy security men lurked in the shadows keeping beady eyes on the proceedings. The man with the cigar was Ivica Dacic, the Serbian minister of the interior. On his right was Miroslav Lajcak, the European Union's senior point man on the Balkans, and to his right was Stefan Fule, the EU's enlargement commissioner. They were celebrating the arrest 18 hours earlier of Ratko Mladic.

Ratko Mladic arrested

STANDING on the hills above Sarajevo at the start of the three-year siege of the Bosnian capital in 1992, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, was infamously heard to demand that his men “burn” the citizens of the city below. The Bosnian war was brutal and cruel, and Mr Mladic was the most brutal and cruel of all its masterminds. On May 26th the Serbian authorities said he had been arrested.

Mr Mladic was indicted by the UN war-crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1995. The charge sheet included genocide.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's appeal

“I HOPE you do not expect me to comment on a court judgment which has not yet come into force,” said Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, when he was asked about the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a jailed business tycoon who was convicted of stealing oil in early January.

On May 24th the sentence did come into force. Mr Khodorkovsky lost his appeal, Mr Medvedev lost his excuse, and Russia lost another chance to modernise itself. Few had expected anything else; a successful appeal would have meant changing a political system held together by corruption and the rule of politics over law.

Obama in Poland

LOOKED at one way, Polish-American relations have never been better. It was President Barack Obama's personal push that got NATO to develop contingency plans for its new members. It is his administration that has sent Patriot missiles to Poland and is going to shift some F-16s there from Italy. The cancelling of the Bush administration's missile-defence shield on the fateful 17th September anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 now looks like a clumsy glitch than the symbolic harbinger of betrayal: the new missile defence scheme, when it happens, should be bigger and more effective, both in protecting Poland and cementing America's commitment to its security.

Georgians in Abkhazia

DRIVE into Abkhazia from Georgian-controlled territory, and the full meaning of the phrase “frozen conflict” soon becomes clear. To begin with, there is the terminology. Have you crossed an international border, as the Abkhaz claim? Or are you still in Georgia, as the Georgian government, like most others, insists? Then there is the decay. Lush vegetation has crept over buildings destroyed by war. Lampposts are red with rust, and rarely work; the road is a procession of potholes. Welcome to Gali, where car-sickness and crumbling infrastructure are facts of life.

For years, little has happened here. Despite the obvious fertility of the soil, agriculture provides the barest of necessities.

Belarus

ULADZIMIR NYAKLYAEV looked triumphant as he stepped out of the Frunzenskiy district court in Minsk earlier today. In most countries receiving a two-year suspended prison sentence would be no cause for celebration. But the man widely regarded as the opposition front-runner in Belarus's flawed presidential vote in December had expected worse (prosecutors had requested three years); he certainly got off lightly compared to Andrei Sannikov, another leading opposition figure. Last Saturday Mr Sannikov was sentenced to five years in a tough penal colony.

A third presidential candidate, Vitaly Rimasheusky, was given two years' probation today.

Unorthodox protest in Ukraine

IF YOU are unfamiliar with the work of Femen, you might not want to read this story with your boss around. Most of the links in this story are certainly NSFW.

Founded in 2008, the woman's-rights group is best known for for staging topless protests in the streets of Kiev, Ukraine's capital. Marching bare-breasted underneath banners with slogans such as "Ukraine is not a brothel," the women of Femen have organised protests against corruption, next year's European football championships (held jointly with Poland) and the sex-tourism industry in Ukraine.

Trouble in Tirana

THE great hope was that Albania's local elections on May 8th would deliver a clear result, in one single bound freeing the country from what Albert Rakipi, head of the Albanian Institute for International Studies, described as the “tyranny of the status quo”. It has turned out to be a forlorn hope. Edi Rama (pictured), head of the opposition Socialist Party, has called for a general revolt against the government of Sali Berisha. Today Albania stands on the brink.

The next few days will tell whether cool heads prevail or if the country slips into serious unrest and, potentially, violence.

Poland's environmental politics

Eight of Warsaw's most influential think tank experts have just published an open letter [link in Polish] arguing that ahead of Poland's EU presidency, which starts in six weeks, the government is neglecting climate-change issues. The letter matters, because its signatories directly influence planning for the six-month presidency, during which a UN climate change conference will take place in Durban.

Entitled: "The forgotten conference", the letter urges Poland to pay more attention to the event.

Judges back Lithuania against Poland

SHORT of arguing over the merits of how to crack an egg, the Lithuanian and Polish squabble over spelling is one of the most tedious and pointless in modern Europe. It has had bad consquences, particularly in the relations between the two countries' foreign ministers. But it also affects human beings, such as people with Polish names who want them spelled the Polish way in Lithuanian official documents. That (probably) would contravene the constitutional protection of the Lithuanian language, which has its own spelling rules. Lithuania says it adopts the same rules as Latvia does towards ethnic Poles there, so why the fuss? Poland says Lithuania is breaking a promise to sort the issue out.

Poland's message to Libya

POLAND takes over the EU presidency in the second half of the year, at a time when the Union's foreign-policy stock has never been lower. The crisis in North Africa looks like just the sort of problem that the institutions set up by the Lisbon Treaty were meant to deal with. But Catherine Ashton has been all but invisible. On a recent visit to Qatar she would neither brief the EU heads of mission there about her meetings, nor take the Hungarian ambassador with her (apparently in an act of petty disapproval of that country's government).

Concentrated fury

BILL BROWDER used to be a Kremlin cheerleader. Now he is one of the regime's most implacable foes. His latest scalp has been to get the Swiss authorities to investigate Credit Suisse for money-laundering, as among its customers are the Russian officials who (Mr Browder says) benefitted from the fraud which led to the death in prison of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. There may well be two sides to this story, but it can be said with a fair degree of certainty that few if any mid-ranking Swiss tax inspectors find it necessary to have bank accounts in Russia.

Orientophobia

I HAVE just been at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn which I feel sets the standard for security shindigs (see here for the agenda), and not only because the organisers let me chair two sessions (disclosure: they paid my flight and hotel). The theme was "Making Values Count". Topics included

Libya: what are we in for?;EU Foreign Policy: Failing, Flailing or Finding Its Feet?;Be Careful What You Wish For: Russia's Multipolar Blues;Lostpolitik: Can Germany Rise to Its Leadership Challenge?; Russia's Leadership and 2012: Election, Selection or Ejection?; and Europe's Energy Security: Geopolitics, Credibility and Corruption.